Greetings to all!
I'm on a very low budget of £510 or $815. For the last month I've been looking for a configuration to suit my gaming and programming/rendering needs within this money frame, asked a few people and was given a lot of different opinions. I am very thorn between 2 configurations

I am aware that the 1st config's tower+PSU is quite a cheap offer so the PSU may not be any good. I was told that the 2nd configuration would suit both of my needs, that it will last for 3-4 years and also that the 1st configuration's components are of low quality and would cause many problems. But I am very sceptical that games would run with very high performance on high settings.
Game targets are: Guild Wars2, Battlefield 3, Witcher 2 enhanced edition, etc.
My Monitor is 19", 60Mhz, supports res only up to 1280 x 1024 but will buy a new one after Christmas 22-23" 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1080

TL;DR: Can the first configuration last some 2-3 years component durability-wise and also be used for programming, 3d rendering and stuff? What about the second one?

I don't see any advantage to using old i7-870 or 920 parts to build a new machine. I'd stick with the first config (i5-3450).

With regards to the first config:

- CoolerMaster is a well known company with a reputation to protect. If the power supply that comes with the case is an actual CM choice (not added by a retailer later) then it may be a bit overrated and/or inefficient, but it should work well enough. The only time you might run into problems is during gaming sessions at high graphics settings, resolution, and frame rates, in which case, reducing settings would fix things until you got a better PSU. In pretty much any other situation, the PSU should be fine.
Do you know any details about the PSU? How much does the case + PSU cost?
(That case is available in Canada at less than $40 after rebate, without a PSU)

- for a graphics card, you could consider a GTX-660 (non Ti). It performs on a par with the the HD7850. Check prices.

I could only find the ASUS Gtx-660 which is at $334, which is $115 more expensive than the AMD one.
On the other side the CM case+PSU is $85. Regarding the PSU I could only find that it's PS2 type(ATX)

If you want feedback specially-tailored to this, I think you need to expand on it a bit.

From what I understand from the limited amount I've done it, programming is essentially text editing and thus not very hardware-sensitive. If you're going to be using some other apps that may need something special, you need to specify that. Rendering definitely has some hardware-sensitive concerns, but again, we really need to know what apps you will be using as they all perform differently and take advantage of different technologies.

A lot of mainstream rendering suites make use of an i7's Hyperthreading feature, but if the choice is between a first-generation i7 and a third-generation i5, the latter is probably still faster.

If you want feedback specially-tailored to this, I think you need to expand on it a bit.

From what I understand from the limited amount I've done it, programming is essentially text editing and thus not very hardware-sensitive. If you're going to be using some other apps that may need something special, you need to specify that. Rendering definitely has some hardware-sensitive concerns, but again, we really need to know what apps you will be using as they all perform differently and take advantage of different technologies.

A lot of mainstream rendering suites make use of an i7's Hyperthreading feature, but if the choice is between a first-generation i7 and a third-generation i5, the latter is probably still faster.

I was told that exactly because Hyperthreading was extremely useful feature, and that 1366 and 1156 were the most stable platforms, which I fail to believe.

I found cheaper components and managed to put in a case and a PSU separately, I'd like to hear your comment about them

- programming takes brain power, not computer power. Unless you are programming professionally, you need not worry about the above config. Even if you are doing it pro or semi-pro, the only difference would be time - a more powerful CPU might take less time to compile the results. But you are only talking minutes at the most.

- programming takes brain power, not computer power. Unless you are programming professionally, you need not worry about the above config. Even if you are doing it pro or semi-pro, the only difference would be time - a more powerful CPU might take less time to compile the results. But you are only talking minutes at the most.

Thankies for your help, I am just curious, why does the voltage matter so much for the RAM?
I thought that less voltage means lower heating.

Consider swapping Asrock with a Gigabyte, MSI or preferably even Asus with similar specs. The extra five bucks give you better heatsinks.

The PSU looks ok, but I still recommend going with top brands for it. Reliability is everything, your entire system depends on it. Corsair's the obvious choice, again worth the extra five bucks.

Also. No known issues with the lga 1155 sockets.

If I recall right Fortron used to be good regarding PSU, might be quite wrong though.

That's the MOBO I came across, compared it to the AsRock one and couldn't find anything that I'll be missing on the Asus one, correct me if there's something that I haven't noticed about it, thankshttp://nikem-bg.net/...escription.html